The Inescapable Labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges

As a young
fiction writer I was once talking with a professor about a story that I was
writing about a library, and she immediately knew that I was thinking of the
Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. She said, “There are certain words you
can’t even utter without bringing Borges to mind: library, labyrinth,
infinity—even the word vertiginous.” Another professor read a story of mine and
said, “You’re trapped. Stop reading Kafka and Borges so much.” Her advice:
“Re-read Proust. He’ll set you free.” It was excellent advice, but the
labyrinths of Borges continue to haunt and to draw me back.

Jorge Luis Borges was born Buenos
Aires in 1899, and he received a world-class education in Europe that brought
him into contact with many influential writers and thinkers who by comparison
now exist as mere footnotes to Borges, because what he brought to his learning
was a mind so searching, so curious, and so infinitely agile that he was
seemingly capable of anything. He became a master of who-knows-how-many
languages, and one of my favorite personal stories he tells is how he came to
learn Italian: He slowly read an annotated bilingual edition of the Divine
Comedy on the train to and from work, and when he was finally finished he
found that he could speak Italian fluently. Another favorite anecdote is that
when he met novelist Anthony Burgess they laughed over having the same last name and
then proceeded to converse with each other in Old Norse.

Borges started as a poet and
essayist, and he continued to pursue these forms brilliantly throughout his
life—his essays are in fact some of the best and most illuminating of the
twentieth century—but it’s as a short story writer that he made his most
indelible mark on world literature. His early work, especially his non-fiction,
is tentative at best and tedious at worst and points to a precocity in need of
a direction, but then in the 1940s two things happened that radically altered
his consciousness and approach. One is that he had a near-death experience that
he later brilliantly transformed into the unforgettable story “The South.” The
other thing was that he translated Franz Kafka into Spanish.

The result of his brush with death
was to give him a relentless drive in a direction that he’d never been so
determined to pursue, and the result of translating the intricately strange and
obsessively precise short stories of Kafka was that he discovered the infinite
possibilities that the form afforded him to pour his vast imagination and erudition
into.

His greatest and most groundbreaking
work was Ficciónes (Fictions), which he published in two parts,
in 1944 and 1946. In this mind-boggling collection Borges wrote of endless
libraries, infinite memories, circular time, false histories that supplant real
ones, mimetic writers whose word-for-word re-creations surpass the originality
of original writers, and arcane but profoundly immediate false histories and invented
ideas that are simply stunning in their ability to move the reader. These concepts
and themes and approaches supplied Borges with an inexhaustible groundwork that
he explored over one of the longest and most fertile literary careers of the
twentieth century.

Perhaps his two most celebrated
stories are “The Library of Babel” (from part one of Ficciónes) and
“Funes the Memorious” (from part two). In “The Library of Babel” the narrator
describes his universe: a (perhaps) infinite library whose endlessly
symmetrical rooms are all filled with the same number of books, which all
contain the same number of symbols, but no two books are exactly the same, and
the universe’s librarians search the stacks their entire lives trying to find
meaning to the books and to their existence. “Funes the Memorious” recounts a
narrator’s encounter with a young man whose riding accident results in a memory
so infinite that he can remember not just every leaf on every tree he’s ever
seen, but every time he’s ever thought of or remembered thinking of each leaf.
The young (but seemingly age-old) Funes learns Latin by reading a few borrowed
books, and his mind becomes an inexhaustible repository for all memory. He was
paralyzed by his accident, however, and so he spends his days remembering and
his nights trying to fall asleep, which he can only do by imagining remote
areas that he’s never seen with his own eyes.

These stories are both infinitely
expansive and terrifyingly claustrophobic, and no reader walks away from
Borges’ writing unchanged. His work began being translated into English in the
1960s, and the effect was momentous. Postmodernism seemed to spring almost directly
from Borges—his influence and presence in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
is substantial—and his influence has only multiplied now that most of his work
has been translated. For the serious devotee, Viking published his
Collected Fictions, Selected Non-Fictions, and Selected Poems
around the 100-year anniversary of Borges’ birth. These books are simply
invaluable. I first encountered Borges in the early 1990s, however, in the
collection Labyrinths, and I still think that this is the best place to
start. Although Labyrinths omits the crucial story “The South,” it culls
most of his best fictions, essays, and parables. Be warned, however: Even this
250-page collection will warp your mind forever. And if you’re a fiction
writer, you will have a hard time escaping the event-horizon of Borges’
vertiginous pull.